Northern lights

The Edinburgh Festival started in 1947 as essentially a music festival, the brainchild of Glyndebourne’s John Christie. The capital was soon turned into a magnet for fringe theatre and other events. It is said that dour natives fearing success left town in a hurry in order to escape the culture-tourist influx. Meanwhile public and private galleries rose to the occasion with special exhibitions, despite the fact that the visual arts have never been part of the official International Festival. Douglas Cooper’s threat to resign his curatorship of a major 1960s Arts Council Delacroix show because some loans had been refused was a sign, among other things, that standards were of the highest. This year the National Galleries of Scotland offer no fewer than three superb exhibitions. They are Gauguin’s Vision; Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Gauguin did not think, with Walter Pater, that all art aspires to the condition of music.